Ever since man gained the ability to fly, he kept pushing the envelope, going higher, longer, faster. The sound barrier was broken and a renaissance of aviation ensued: jet engines made mass aerial transportation cheap and fast enough for the majority of people. At the same time, records were being repeatedly broken by the fledgling NASA and the Air Force, each for their own purposes.
Aircrafts like the iconic X-15 (still holding the record for fastest manned aircraft) were instrumental in understanding the mechanics of supersonic flight at higher Mach numbers (the X-15 record is Mach 6.7). A lesser known aircraft, the XB-70 Valkyrie, was a huge leap in sustained controlled supersonic flight, since it demonstrated the capacity to fly at Mach 3 continuously, with a significant payload and range.
The techniques, ideas, and materials developed for the XB-70 Valkyrie (which was abandoned due to funding problems and the shift to using ICBMs as a more practical solution for strategic nuclear bombing), made a commercial supersonic aircraft a viable idea. NASA started work on a SST (Supersonic Transport) vehicle using the remaining XB-70 as a test-bed vehicle, but by that time the Concorde program had already begun, and soon the Soviets followed.
Eventually, NASA was denied further funding for the SST project, but both the Concorde and its Russian counterpart, the Tu-144, made it into production. From then on though, things became difficult for both SSTs, since the Tu-144 only made 55 scheduled flights with Aeroflot before being withdrawn from service in 1979. Concorde had a longer but still troubled life, with both operators, Air France and British Airways, struggling to make a profit out of the aircraft.
When it comes to grant ventures such as supersonic commercial transportation, being the fastest at any cost has no place in the aviation industry. It is all fine and well for a government to fund projects such as the XB-70 and the SR-71, but such aircrafts fill niche roles, with very specific flight profiles.
It seems that Aerospatiale and BaE were so overtaken by sheer enthusiasm at the prospect of producing a commercial supersonic passenger aircraft that they forgot to ask airlines how much they were willing to pay, and in the end only the government-owned airlines of France and the U.K. were practically forced to operate the aircraft, merely to save some political face. British Airways managed to turn in a small profit overall but Air France was significantly hurt by the Concorde.
A complicated sum of
political and financial factors, as well as a small witch hunt about the effects of the Concorde on the ozone as well as its sonic boom effect, made operating the aircraft a nightmare. The Tu-144 never experienced the same amount of problems mainly due to its much more brief and constrained operational life.